Katarina Mihailović nabs award for her research on a lost art film
Katarina Mihailović (far left) was awarded the Étudiants-chercheurs étoiles - Société et culture award from the Fonds de recherche du Québec for her research into the works of Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev.
When she travels to Belgrade, Serbia, this summer, Katarina Mihailović may finally come face-to-face with the filmmaker she has been studying for the better part of a decade.
Yugoslav director and screenwriter Dušan Makavejev first captured Mihailović’s imagination when she was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“I discovered him and became very, very interested in him. I also speak the language because I’m originally from Yugoslavia, so it made research easier,” she says.
It was during her time at UNC that she managed to score a phone call with the filmmaker himself.
“When I got to chat with him on the phone, I was shocked at how friendly and kind and generous he was, because I figured I was just a student bothering him. But he was very kind, and he talked to me for a very long time,” she says.
Makavejev has remained a part of Mihailović’s academic life, figuring heavily into her work as a PhD candidate in film studies at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema.
“I’ve stayed intrigued by him, even though I’ve expanded my area of research,” she says.
Earlier this month, Mihailović won a student research award from the Fonds de recherche du Québec for her article “From a Priest Into a Clown: Makavejev’s Critical Transformation of Bergman,” published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema in March 2014.
The article began deep in the archives at Harvard, where she says there is a particularly excellent Slavic collection. There, she discovered clips that Makavejev had extracted from several of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s works by reading old journals.
“When I was there, I discovered that fragments of this lost film experiment that he made in the ‘70s were actually in [Harvard’s] collection, Mihailović says.
“It intrigued me, and it turned out this whole idea of taking films by other filmmakers and kind of cutting them up was something he actually did as a pedagogic practice while he was teaching at Harvard.”
Not all the pieces of Makavejev’s experimental hour-long film made it — only about 10 minutes survived — but his journal lived on. With Makavejev’s detailed descriptions of the project in hand, Mihailović sifted through the Bergman films referenced and reconstructed the film herself.
“It’s a work of criticism, but at the same time, it’s a completely original creative act,” she says.
After studying Makavejev throughout her undergraduate and master’s degrees — he was one of a small handful of filmmakers she studied for her Concordia master’s thesis on political filmmaking in Europe after 1968’s worldwide protests — she has since broadened her scope for her PhD.
The Yugoslav filmmaker was a member of a cultural movement centered on art cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s in the capital of the former Yugoslavia. This will form the overarching subject of Mihailović’s dissertation.
“The ciné-clubs in Belgrade were such an important institution where a lot of the famous New Wave directors of the ‘60s came through,” she says. “Those institutions were so formative for Yugoslav art cinema.”